Facebook Unleashes New Timeline UI

Facebook today released its new Timeline user interface, allowing the hundreds of millions of people who access the social networking service to opt-in to this new, more visual profile type. The feature was first revealed at the company's F8 developer conference back in September.

Timeline is a replacement for the Facebook profile view, or what you see when you view information about another person. (And what they see when they look you up.) It's more graphical and dynamic than the old profile view, in my opinion, and is really nice looking.

It could also be a privacy disaster: Looking at my own Timeline, I can see that virtually everything I've posted to Facebook over four-plus years has been made public via this view. So now I need to fix that, apparently.

Update: Thanks to reader Matt H. who tells me you can limit the visibility of past posts by visiting Facebook's Privacy settings. Why wasn't this the default, given that I previously configured these posts to be visible only to Friends? Only Facebook could explain that.

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